FreeWorld

FreeWorld would use the Elevate Prize funding to hire 4 additional team members to help scale our solution to over 1,000 returning citizens across the US. 

This solution would save tax payers $13M+ in recidivism cost savings and provide $50M+ of economic benefit.

Our full stack solution will end generational poverty and recidivism within these families through high wage careers and asset ownership. 

Like many others that been impacted by the criminal justice system, I grew up in a childhood filled with racism, abuse, poverty, and trauma. 

My parents were immigrants and we grew up extremely poor. My father had a bad temper and would always say that I was, "good for nothing." He attempted to kill me several times. As a kid, I used to always run away from home. 

When I was 11, my mom filed for divorce and moved me to Texas with her. At this point in my life, I was angry and felt alone, so I ended up joining a gang.

At the age of 15, I was caught for a first degree felony, Aggravated Robbery, and sentenced to 12 years in prison. 

While in prison, I met other inmates that had similar stories to my own. I learned that these people had made grave mistakes, but were good people coming from bad circumstances. These early experiences helped to influence my life's mission after release. 

My purpose in life is to end mass incarceration. I strongly believe that living wage career opportunities present a life line out of poverty and more importantly, out of prison. 

America incarcerates more people than any other nation on earth. 76% of people that go to prison, return within 3 years, and 89% of those that are rearrested are unemployed. Criminal records bar people from earning living wage employment opportunities, which results in desperation.

Living wage employment is the key to preventing recidivism. We learned in trucking that there was a severe labor shortage of qualified drivers to meet the increasing demand for trucking. We developed a scalable, online solution to solve this need. 

Our program stabilizes, educates, and places returning citizens into high ROI careers within 45 days of application to our program.

Students receive help with housing, transportation, and documentation. We provide funding and education so students can learn the conceptual frameworks to drive a commercial vehicle. We partner with local trucking schools across the country to give our students behind the wheel experience. 

Once a student graduates, we place them into a job and keep track of their income progress for 3 years of additional support to ensure each graduate is successful and staying out of prison.

We use of income share agreements. Every graduate pays it forward to help 2-3 additional graduates go through our program. 

45 days from application, you could be in a career. That's how fast we work. 

We're the most comprehensive, end-to-end solution in the market. Within a week of application, we can get you into housing, give you transportation, and all of your documentation. You don't have to pay anything upfront, in fact, we actually pay you up to $2,000 to get your license. We're staffed by ex-felons, for ex-felons. We use income share agreements that allow our graduates to pay it forward and help others, but only if they are doing really well in their careers. We provide 3 years of supportive services to help you build wealth, get off parole, buy a house for the first time, and you are surrounded by other members of your community that are transforming their lives as well. 

We expect that the revenue from our income share agreement model will allow us to be 100% self-sustaining within the next 4 years. We can deploy our solution quickly across the US and get people working. We will leverage the immense amount of data, combination with our outcomes, to create systemic policy reform. 

77M Americans have a criminal record which legally bars them from housing, education, and job opportunities. I know, because I've lived it. 

Our short term strategy is to train and place 1M returning citizens into high wage careers and help them build strong financial foundations to end the generational cycle of poverty and recidivism in their families. We want our men to be positive role models in their households and have the economic resources to give their kids a better future than they had. 

Our long term strategy is to leverage our outcomes and scale to influence criminal justice reform. 

That's why we purposely created an online program that could be scaled anywhere in the country, that can quickly help returning citizens get the training they need in a high demand field that will hire people, regardless of their criminal history, and started an income share agreement program to help us get to a point of self-sustainability. It is extremely time consuming and challenging to scale on philanthropy alone; we must find other ways to bring in capital to help achieve our mission. 

This year, we're likely to serve close to 600 people in our program. By next year, we expect to increase enrollment to 2,000 people.

Recidivism rate - how many people end up returning to prison 3 years after graduation?

Graduation rate - how many people make it through our entire program?

Job placement - how many people are placed into jobs within 4 weeks of graduation?

Income growth - how much more are they making post graduation at the 6 month, 12 month, 24 month, and 36 months out from graduation?

Debt reduction - what level of debt are our graduates 6, 12, 24, and 36 months out?

Credit score - how much has our graduate's credit scores gone up in 6, 12, 24, and 36 month out?

Job retention - how many graduates get and keep jobs 6, 12, 24, and 36 months out?

ISA repayment - what is our current LTV, delinquency, late payments, etc. 

Hiring: One challenge for us is that we try to focus our hiring with people with criminal histories, which can be quite difficult as criminal records bar most people from getting the  experience that we need as an organization. 

Plan: We will build partnerships with orgs that serve people with criminal histories and identify really incredible success stories across the nation through competition prizes with orgs like Schmidt Futures. FreeWorld will become an aggregator of highly talented returning citizens.

Overcoming barriers: The funding allows us to hire in the first place. This also is a major credentialing opportunity as FreeWorld is still an early stage startup and not many people know about us. 

Tech: We are identifying government responsibilities like social security card and driver license issuance and seeing if we can privatize them. This would unblock reliance on gov entities and create a delightful experience for the people we serve. 

Plan: We have highlighted tech that can get us there, there are already private institutions in the market that have been able to gain access. 

Overcoming barriers: Funding will allow us to get the right talent to help build the technology that we'll need. 

1. Winning the competition would provide signaling to other foundations to invest in our work.
2. This would be a validator to help us accelerate our long-term goal of setting up pay for performance programs with the government. Our solution saves tax payers millions of dollars and provides tax revenue to State and Federal governments. With government funding, we can accelerate towards our goal of serving 1M people within 10 years. 
3. The would help us secure referral partnerships across the country to identify returning citizens desperate in need, to join our program.
4. This would be a wonderful recruitment tool to find mission oriented talent to join FreeWorld.
5. This would help us push forward public policy toward racial equity and criminal justice reform. 

"The people closest to the problem are closest to the solution, but the farthest from the resources."

That quote has stuck with me for a very long time. That's why we're so focused on hiring returning citizens for all positions throughout the company. We firmly believe that people with lived experience know the problem best, and therefore understand what solutions are needed to solve them.  

This has also forced us to re-examine typical hiring practices  and innovate new ones that help us look past the resume and look more at the unique characteristics and experiences of each individual as many do not have the work experience that we would typically look for. We've hired individuals in the past who had just come out of prison and needed help getting to a stable life before even starting with us! 

1. Jason Wang, Founder/CEO - Lived experience/ex-felon. Earned a double masters at UT Dallas and started 4 companies. Worked with nonprofits that serve returning citizens for the past 13 years. Ex-management consultant, tech founder, and entrepreneur. 

2. Renee Sandler, Head of Operations - Successful female Founder/CEO of a CPG company. Scaled operations and built partnerships with the top 25 largest distributors in the world. Sold company to private equity. Was managing partner of Launchpad 2x and helped 150 women create $1.5B in economic impact over 10 years. Grew up poor and currently has a partner that was convicted of a drug charge. 

3. O'Neal Heard, Success Manager - Served 5 years in prison for armed robbery. Graduated from our program and was successful as a truck driver. Grew up in the same neighborhoods that our students have been through. 

4. Shawn Bina, Online CDL A Instructor - Served 25 years in prison. Ex-meth addict. Developed and taught classes while in prison. Earned a CDL A license on his own after release and started his own business. 

5. Ross Patton, Senior Full Stack Developer - 10+ years of experience. Volunteers as a mentor for returning citizens that are going through coding bootcamps. 

When I went to prison, there were very few programs available for inmates, so I created a bible study, GED class, started our first prison newsletter, and even petitioned for college courses. 

In 2007, the news found out that correctional officers were sexually assaulting 13 year old boys and girls under their care. I offered to testify in front of the Texas State Senate for criminal justice reform. This led to thousands of kids being released from maximum security prison to community programs that were better suited for their rehabilitation. 

During my last year of incarceration, I was hired by Will Harrell, the Independent Ombudsman for the Texas Youth Commission who was appointed by the governor. In my work with him, we developed a brand new rehabilitation program that is now being taught today, revised policies that kept kids in cages for months at a time, and launched the first State-wide know your rights program for inmates. We also developed the first Bill of Rights for parents, which was adopted throughout the State. 

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FreeWorld would use the Elevate Prize funding to hire 4 additional team members to help scale our solution to over 1,000 returning citizens across the US. 

This solution would save tax payers $13M+ in recidivism cost savings and provide $50M+ of economic benefit.

Our full stack solution will end generational poverty and recidivism within these families through high wage careers and asset ownership. 

We mostly work with parole/probation in the local areas that we deploy to. Other organizations that serve as referrals are Defy Ventures, Prison Entrepreneurship Program, and other similar organizations that work with returning citizens.